The Essence of Loneliness

It all had started by a genius British scientist working in a nuclear research laboratory in 1990. The WWW (World Wide Web) had started its journey from a confined laboratory room which now has been used in every corner of the world. I should say this is the most influential invention in the history of mankind after the invention of wheel and there is a commonality in the purpose of the inventions between these two and that is – they both connect people. Before the wheel, life was slow, at max 5 mph, which is the average speed, a person can walk up to, and similarly before the internet, you can’t imagine hundreds of millions of people are communicating through the web instantly across the globe. This became possible through this web technology.

In this post I'll try to see the benefits and risks of being connected at all the time and also seek for ways on how to balance our life within this ever-connectedness of our life.

Can you imagine a day without internet at home, forget about at work? When you need a book, you log on to Amazon.com; when you want to watch movie, you connect to Netflix; when you want to get the latest updated news, you connect to CNN.com or your preferred news site; when you are in need of any academic reference, you log on to Wikipedia.org; you pay your bill online; you buy stuffs online; you share your feelings, on facebook and on twitter, that means, online. We get everything within our fingertip in a split of a second. The World Wide Web has changed the way we, the human, live. Now a days, the best knowledgeable person is not the one who knows the most but the one who can find the most, and find that quickest. It’s completely changed the way we define knowledge, i.e. learn it and remember it, due to the fact that there is enormous amount of information available surrounding us that no human brain can remember all of them. So it has changed from “Learn, Learn and Learn” to “Learn, Unlearn and Re-learn”.

But with all of these game changing benefits of the World Wide Web i.e. internet technology, what we’re missing or what have we lost? What are we trading off to get that amazingly faster and connected world? We’re losing the essence of “Loneliness”. Think about your day, or any usual day – for me, I woke up with the sound of alarm, set on my blackberry; before I got off the bed, I had a quick peak on my blackberry if I have any early morning meeting, or any important email from the offshore team in India, then after breakfast I log on to nextbus.com, that is on my blackberry, to check exactly what time the next bus will arrive at my stop, then read today’s newspaper on my smartphone. Once I’m at work, it’s all about these digital technologies: computer, intranet, internet, blackberry, web conference, teleconference, you name it.  

No doubt that we’re getting a lot of work done in a short period of time because of all these digital technologies, but at what cost? In South Korea, a clinic is opened to provide treatment, what they call is Internet Addiction Disorder, to young people who are addicted to internet. It’s not only in South Korea, but in the USA, China, Netherland etc., there are clinics to treat people with Internet Addiction Disorder. Here's a shocking story about an infant whose parents were addicted to internet:

"In 2009, Kim Sa-rang, a 3-month-old Korean child, died from malnutrition after both her parents spent hours each day in an internet cafe raising a virtual child on an online game, Prius Online'

Another risk of this ever connected world is that we’re losing our creativity and getting very less time for critical thinking. There is almost no time to think because you need a quiet uninterrupted time to think creatively– it’s found in a study that on an average, an employee gets 3 minutes of continuous uninterrupted time during a work day. In every few seconds or minutes you’ll see an email message pops up or will hear the ring of your phone.

“Once there is an interruption, statistics tells us that it takes 20 minutes to get back to the level of concentration that we were at prior to the disruption.”

We became so much use to with this interruption that we lose the chance of being alone even when we get it. For me, the first thing I do after jumping into the car and starting the engine is to turn on the radio. We became so much afraid of being alone at any point in time.

What’s the way out of this situation? How do we get back some of what we have already lost? Good news is that a good number of people have started thinking about how to balance their life; business organizations aren't out of that movement. Intel has given all of their managers a few hours in a week to be in their offices while they are disconnected from their internet and phone, to provide them a quiet time to keep themselves creative. Google also has similar quiet hours for their employees.

How about one day in a week or month, we unplug the internet from our computer and unplug the cable at home and give us a time to be alone and think about what we have done, what are we doing and what we’re going to do, and to realize what we have lost from our life.

My point is not to ask everyone that we should throw our all digital devices out the window but we should at least try balance our life while using these digital technologies and use them responsibly. By doing that we might get some of the essence of loneliness back to our life. 

I would like to finish this post with a research outcome, conducted by Gloria Mark, Ph.D., an associate professor at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and a leading expert on work, who researched on workplace interruptions and came to a fascinating conclusion: 

"We don't have work days -- we have work minutes that last all day. In our study, we observed for a half day, then we shadowed 36 managers, financial analysts, software developers, engineers, and project leaders for three days. We literally followed people around all day and timed every event [that happened], to the second. We defined an event as the amount of time that people spent in continuous uninterrupted use of a device or an interaction with other people. That meant a telephone call, working on a document, typing an e-mail, or interacting with someone who came into their cubicle.

What we found is that the average amount of time that people spent on any single event before being interrupted or before switching was about three minutes. To be specific, three minutes and five seconds, on average. That does not include formal meetings, because we figured if they were in a formal meeting, they were prisoners at the meeting, right? They couldn't leave or switch activities. So we didn't count that. Then we looked at [use of] devices, working on a PC, the desk phone, using any kind of paper document, using a cell phone. We found the average amount of time that people spent working on a device before switching was 2 minutes and 11 seconds.

You think you sit at your PC for a long time, but it's not true. You usually sit at it briefly before you switch to something else. You're interrupted by a person, by a phone call, or you do something on paper."

Reference: 

https://www.engineeringforchange.org/news/2012/01/12/the_most_important_invention_in_human_history.html

http://businessjournal.gallup.com/content/23146/too-many-interruptions-work.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prius_Online

Healing Naturally

Today I’m going to share few of my personal stories that had changed the way I see medications and inspired me to look deeper into natural healing.

What is natural healing?

Natural healing is giving your body a chance to work organically to solve a health problem. Like for example – if you've a tiny cut or scratch on your skin and you wait for a day or two, you see that your body takes care of it and heals it. But the problem comes when the cut is large enough that you need to aid your body to fight against it.

Let me clarify first – I’m no way advocating to stop going to doctor's office or visiting CVS but my soul purpose of this post is to discover how we can limit those.

Do we really read the label on the medication seriously? I certainly not. Because if I read those warnings given on it, I won’t be able to swallow any of those. And more over those warning changes periodically. For example, now FDA is saying to not to give any cough medications (e.g. Delcym) to child under 5 years of old. I clearly remember it was 2 years and under. So what happened to it that I gave my daughter cough medicine when she was just three. It declared safe a few years ago but with discoveries of more data on side effects now has proved it harmful. What’re the side effects she went through due to this misinformation? You can’t sue pharmaceuticals or FDA as they've all those fine prints to protect them.

If you think vitamin tablets are risk free or have no side effects, read the new research findings. You won’t take them if you know that apparently candy like vitamin tablets are not free of side effects.

Let’s check out few warnings of a very popular medication:

• Clinical trials of of up to three years duration have shown an increased risk of serious cardiovascular (CV) thrombotic events, myocardial infarction, and stroke, which can be fatal.
• It can lead to onset of new hypertension or worsening of pre-existing hypertension, either of which may contribute to the increased incidence of CV events
• It can cause congestive heart failure and edema
• It can cause serious gastrointestinal (GI) adverse events including inflammation, bleeding, ulceration, and perforation of the stomach, small intestine, or large intestine, which can be fatal.
• Long-term administration of this medication has resulted in renal papillary necrosis and other renal injury.
• It can cause serious skin adverse events such as exfoliative dermatitis, Stevens-Johnson syndrome (SJS), and toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN), which can be fatal

So, can you guess the name of the medication for which I’ve mentioned the side effects? It’s very famous, over the counter medication - Motrin (an NSAID), which is a brand and the generic ingredient is Ibuprofen.

Let’s now check how a medicine gets approved by the regulatory body i.e. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). FDA approves a medicine when the pharmaceutical companies can prove a drug is sufficiently safe for human to use. The word “sufficiently” is interesting as that scale is determined by applying to a sufficiently large number of people with certain level of benefits and limited amount of adverse effect. For example “Claritin” tablet was trialed with 90,000 of people and got FDA approval. As a side note, there's an ongoing debate on the funding sources of FDA that may have put them in a place where an independent review of the drug and drug related processes are very tough, if not impossible, to take place which provides a plausible explanation to withdrawal of some FDA approved drugs voluntarily by the pharmaceutical companies.

So what are our options? should we be dependent on medications for every little things? My answer is definitely not. We should look back on natural healing - giving our body a chance to heal itself. This body is an amazing machine - which has regenerative process inbuilt and can cure a lot of things without any external help. And when an supplementary supports are given, it can prevent and cure lot of day to day life health problems, which it’s been doing for millions of years.

To see how natural healing works, I have been doing some experiment on me for last couple of years. Let’s see some of the amazing results:

My back pain started few years ago which turned so worse that I had to call sick often, specially during the cold days in winter. And with every visit to my primary physician, I was getting prescription for Motrin tablets for one to two weeks. One day I thought I don’t want to go my entire life with Motrin every now and then, specially after reading those side effects. As my mother had advised me to rub mustard oil heated with garlic (which is pretty stinky, so I have to take bath afterwards) at the paining muscles. That drastically changed the frequencies of getting the back pain. With that I also changed the mattress with which in last 2 years I had zero sick call due to the back pain.

I had done another experiment in this Spring. I got bad cough and itchy throat which is not so abnormal for Spring. Instead of rushing to CVS or Walmart pharmacy, as an experiment, I had started drinking ginger and clove tea - the suggestion I had gotten from my mother. It took me three to four weeks to fully recover but my cough was completely cured without taking a single allergy tablet. Until it was cured I was carrying a ziploc bag of cloves and put one clove into mouth to suppresses the immediate coughing when I was outside: on the train, at work etc. It was very tempting to fall into the trap of attractive adds on TV showing happy people who are on allergy medications for the entire length of Spring. But I pushed that out to prove that it's possible to realistically heal cough with natural means.

If you think that natural healing works only with small issues – that’s wrong. Even you can control your high blood pressure if you eat one apple every day, lowering intake of sodium, and exercise regularly.

Finally I would like to close this post with a simple comment - we've lost tremendous amount of things in our life for the sake of getting speed in our life which came with a very high cost. Let's look back, seek solution from nature - it can provide us solutions for majority of our problems which we have decided to overlook for long.